Word: workers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LEVISON PROVIDES an education for middle-class radicals and liberals: he simply describes the working day of an industrial or blue-collar worker. A worker is forced to submit to military authoritarianism while on the job: he or she must do what the foreman demands. Most factories have rules--despite "job enrichment" programs--which prohibit "cat calls, horseplay, making preparation to leave before the whistle sounds, littering, wasting time, and loitering in the toilets." In addition, some companies have the right to discipline workers for "using abusive language" and 'distracting the attention of other employees." Levison sums up the much...
...revolutionary in the long run. This point is significant, because Levison is a McGovern liberal, and through the book's serialization in The New Yorker it might come to have high currency among the middle-class Left. As a whole. Levison attempts to provide the basis for a worker-affluent liberal alliance; his advocacy of socialism as the completion of American democracy shows the response of a good portion of the liberal intellectuals presently confronted with economic and cultural crisis (Pete Hamill's "Socialism in America" in recent Village Voice is further evidence of some liberal Democrats' left-ward movement...
Levison further discredits the "affluent worker" thesis--the idea of the working class having been bought off of radicalism by wage rises--by a simple glance at statistics...
...affluent worker, who until recently was supposed to be typical, constitutes 12 to 15 per cent of the working class, white and black. Eighty five per cent are not 'typical.' The average worker earned $9.500 in 1970, much closer to poverty than to affluence...
These are the strong points of Levison's book: a mass of detail and understanding of working class life, and the upholding of the essentially "progressive" character of the American worker. But there are discrepancies that Levison cannot account for, and he conveniently leaves them out of his book. For example, American workers probably are more patriotic and religious than the middle and ruling class. This goes along with their preindustrial dreams, which still have ideological power. Workers in America seem to oppose capitalism in two ways, and Levison only clearly sees one side of their opposition, and ignores...